The National Union of Healthcare Workers, which has made the fight for mental health parity one of its core missions, has endorsed Scott Wiener, the leading parity advocate in the California Senate, to represent San Francisco in Congress.
While Wiener gets more attention for his bills protecting the rights of LGBTQ Californians, increasing housing production and standing up to the Trump Administration, no legislator has done more to help Californians access timely, appropriate mental health care and substance use disorder treatment.
Since 2020, Wiener has authored several major mental health parity bills that have been signed into law, including:
- SB 855, which requires health plans to provide care for the full range of mental health and substance use disorders in the standard clinical manuals and arrange out-of-network care when timely in-network care is not available.
- SB 221, a bill sponsored by NUHW that requires health plans to provide patients medically necessary return therapy appointments within two weeks of their previous appointment — not six-to-eight weeks, which had become the norm for many Kaiser Permanente patients.
- SB 858, a bill sponsored by NUHW that increased maximum fines tenfold — from $2,500 to $25,00. The bill increased many of the maximum penalties on health plans for failing to provide timely care for the first time since 1975.
Wiener is currently the author of SB 747, a bill that could help increase the number of mental health therapists in California by shedding light on the stark pay disparities between mental health clinicians and medical providers whose jobs require similar educational and licensing requirements.
“Scott Wiener is a brilliant legislator who takes on difficult challenges and gets results for the most vulnerable people in our city,” said NUHW President Sal Rosselli, a San Francisco resident. “Scott isn’t afraid to take on powerful interests like health insurers if it means doing the right thing for his constituents. We need a fearless, effective fighter for San Francisco in Washington D.C, and NUHW members are ready to knock on as many doors and make as many phone calls as necessary to elect Scott Wiener to Congress.
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The National Union of Healthcare Workers represents 19,000 healthcare workers in California and Hawai’i, including about 6,000 mental health workers. In San Francisco, NUHW represents mental health workers at Kaiser Permanente, Richmond Area Multiservices, Inc., and the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team.
